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Draggable objects

redblobgames.com

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Re: Draggable objects

#41

Post by dang »

It's a great site, but the home page of such a site doesn't make for a great HN submission because it falls in the category of "list": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Lists don't make great HN submissions because they don't point to anything specific enough. The resulting discussion tends to be generic and shallow, because the only material to discuss is the lowest-common-denominator, i.e. whatever the items on the list have in common.

This thread is a nice example because the comments are only about the site in general—mostly how good it is—which of course is true, but not 'interesting' (in HN's sense of the word) enough to devote a frontpage slot to (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

The solution is to pick the most interesting element from the list and submit that instead. Maybe we should ask amitp to nominate one :)

Edit: I did that and have changed the URL now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708834. (I will also mark the current comment off topic so it goes to the bottom of the page.)

Re: Draggable objects

#42

Post by gowld »

tsumnia wrote: post #28

A fantastic site. When I originally took over teaching Intro to AI, I initially relied on the A* search closed/open set pseudocode explanation[1]. However, when it would come time to ask students to implement it, I was constantly finding students absolutely confused by the approach. Once I swapped over to Amit's A* explanation, the number of confused students dropped significantly. Forever thankful for their walkthro…

What's the difference between the approaches?

Re: Draggable objects

#43

Post by dang »

amitp wrote: post #38

Thank you everyone! What a surprise to be on HN today. Happy to answer questions!

Can you please nominate a specific URL on your site that we can change the top link to? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37707904 for why)

What's your most interesting piece that hasn't gotten sufficient attention yet? I believe HN has had many great threads about the A* and hexagonal grid articles over the years. Is there a comparable one that's been overlooked so far?

Re: Draggable objects

#45

Post by [deleted] »

drng wrote: post #33
feoren wrote: post #20

Apart from the excellent subject matter, I often pull up this site during UI/UX discussions. Amit clearly has the ability to do really advanced JavaScript visualizations, but he only uses it exactly when necessary. Most of it is a plain document like you might write in Markdown, but when he uses JavaScript, it's illuminating, connected to all the other examples, and clean. Any animation he uses is clearly initiated b…

This almost perfectly describes https://ciechanow.ski/ as well. Worth poking through if you haven't seen it before.

[deleted]

Re: Draggable objects

#46

Post by amitp »

dang wrote: post #43
amitp wrote: post #38

Thank you everyone! What a surprise to be on HN today. Happy to answer questions!

Can you please nominate a specific URL on your site that we can change the top link to? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37707904 for why) What's your most interesting piece that hasn't gotten sufficient attention yet? I believe HN has had many great threads about the A* and hexagonal grid articles over the years. Is there a comparable one that's been overlooked so far?

This year I've mostly been updating existing pages in small ways (examples: [1] [2]). This week I've been fixing broken links, which isn't a good HN submission.

I think the best candidate is https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/ . It's from earlier this year and hasn't been posted to HN yet (I think).

[1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/explaining-hexagon-layo...

[2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/improving-mapgen4s-boun...

Re: Draggable objects

#47

Post by dang »

amitp wrote: post #46
dang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please nominate a specific URL on your site that we can change the top link to? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37707904 for why) What's your most interesting piece that hasn't gotten sufficient attention yet? I believe HN has had many great threads about the A* and hexagonal grid articles over the years. Is there a comparable one that's been overlooked so far?

This year I've mostly been updating existing pages in small ways (examples: [1] [2]). This week I've been fixing broken links, which isn't a good HN submission. I think the best candidate is https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/ . It's from earlier this year and hasn't been posted to HN yet (I think). [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/explaining-hexagon-layo... [2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023…

I've changed to that page from https://www.redblobgames.com/. Thanks!

Obviously, many comments on the thread predate this change, but there's enough context here for readers to figure that out, and hopefully we can get a more specific discussion going.

Re: Draggable objects

#49

Post by trees101 »

I wonder if graph search algorithms such as described on this site(https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction...) have applications in other strategies.

Consider a game like Age of Empires. In the beginning you might be able to defend your village by building walls around it. For an attacker, there is a high cost to go through the wall. But when cannons are invented, suddenly the cost of going through the wall drops.

Is there a way to model this? Can you draw a graph of the terrain that looks different before and after the invention of cannon?

Re: Draggable objects

#50

Post by sh1mmer »

dang wrote: post #47
amitp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year I've mostly been updating existing pages in small ways (examples: [1] [2]). This week I've been fixing broken links, which isn't a good HN submission. I think the best candidate is https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/ . It's from earlier this year and hasn't been posted to HN yet (I think). [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/explaining-hexagon-layo... [2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023…

I've changed to that page from https://www.redblobgames.com/ . Thanks! Obviously, many comments on the thread predate this change, but there's enough context here for readers to figure that out, and hopefully we can get a more specific discussion going.

FWIW, dang, while I know guidelines are to post specific things for me personally “check out this collection of interactive tutorials” is actually a lot more interesting/helpful than linking to a single tutorial, especially when it’s not clear from that tutorial it’s part of a collection larger collection.

Generally I feel like links to collections of stuff do well when they are interesting and don’t when they aren’t and that you modding to a specific example isn’t actually improving quality.

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